apr 1, 1960 - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded

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SNCC:A student civil rights group founded in 1960, under the mentorship of Ella Baker, that conducted sit-ins, voter registration drives, and other actions to advance racial equality throughout the 1960s.


Inspired by the sit-ins, an SCLC official named Ella Baker helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) in 1960 to facilitate more student protests. By the end of the year, a wave of sit-ins had swept from North Carolina into Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee. At protests in 126 cities, more than 50,000 people participated, and 3,600 went to jail. The sit-ins drew black college students into the movement in significant numbers for the first time. Northern students formed solidarity committees and raised money for bail, and SNCC quickly emerged as the most important student protest organization in the country.

Demonstrators at a lunch counter sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi, are smeared with ketchup, mustard, and sugar by opponents of desegregation in 1963. Student-led sit-ins, as a nonviolent civil rights protest, spread across the South between 1960, when they first appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina, and 1963.

Baker took a special interest in students because she found them receptive to her notion of participatory democracy (see “Comparing Interpretations”). The granddaughter of slaves, Baker had moved to Harlem in the 1930s, where she worked for New Deal agencies and then the NAACP. She believed in nurturing leaders from the grass roots, encouraging ordinary people to stand up for their rights rather than depend on charismatic movement stars. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she once said. However, Baker wound up nurturing a generation of civil rights leaders in SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Anne Moody, John Lewis, and Diane Nash.

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